Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
Mr. Pwnage wrote:
Braille is used as a "secret code" for some messages, designed to be fairly obscure to most players but still easy enough to look up if someone comes across it and wants to figure out what it is.
There was actually a guide to it in the manual, so they intended players to be able to translate it.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
Warp wrote:
Thus the principle I like the most is "end the input where no further input can make the game end faster".
I don't think that's unambiguous enough. In Rosenkreuzstilette, there are two possible routes. One of the routes involves obtaining a particular item, spending time in the process; this lets you get a final boss fight that's faster than skipping the item, and that lets you end input at the start of the boss fight. The other route, skipping the item, means that the final boss fight is shorter, but ends earlier relative to the run as a whole (because skipping the item saves time, letting you get to the fight earlier); you have to input all the way through it.
So with your definition, it'd be faster to obtain the item; at the point when you end input, there's no way to beat the game faster from there. It is possible to beat the game faster, but only by changing route earlier.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
"Miss attack: RNG mod 100 >= miss attack probability (if probablility is 70%, RNG mod 100 has to be 70 or higher for that attack to miss)."
Are you sure? That would mean that a 0% miss move would miss if the RNG rolled a value that's divisible by 100. I suspect you probably mean > rather than >=, but don't know for certain.
EDIT: Oh, you mean that it misses if RNG mod 100 is greater than or equal to the hit probability. That makes more sense.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
One possible reason to select [E] may be a better translation; I don't know if it's true in this case, but many DS games have separate translations for the [U] and [E] versions. (Basically because the DS has a language setting, so for a European release, it's common to translate into a bunch of different European languages that are controlled by the DS's language setting, and game companies' translation workflow is often designed such that the European translators work on the English version separately from the US translators working on the US English version.)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
andypanther wrote:
Baxter wrote:
More of a general remark, but I think it should be clear in (nearly) all of the clips what is going on, even if the viewer is unfamiliar with the game. Sometimes the story behind it is cooler than how it looks. I don't know for instance how well a clip of a pokemon being caught would work in such a video. Also, the more the video and the audio coincide, the better.
Well, the catching of Missingno could also be showed, as this glitch is so well known. But maybe you're right and not everyone would find this interesting, it's just that I'm a big fan of Pokémon-TASes ^^
If you want to show off an unlikely Pokémon catch, you could show Mewtwo being caught in a regular Pokéball; that should be pretty recognisable to any Pokémon fan as being something that shouldn't happen. I doubt there's any way to convey it to people who aren't fans of the series, though.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
I know that several people dislike speedruns which are just glitch chaining, so I think we should definitely have some clips of things that are clearly intended, yet clearly done far too precisely anyway. (Also, we need some clear instances of luck manipulation: are there any RPGs with a battle system that runs fast enough that we can just have "CRITICAL! CRITICAL! CRITICAL! popping up on screen for a few seconds?" I guess the Tetris playaround would work well for that, from another point of view.)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
The objective criteria (like beating existing records, etc.) are objective, so there's not a whole lot of point on people voting on them; it won't change whether they're actually met by the run or not.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
Basically it's because most people trying to break Pokémon are trying to get perfect Pokémon on an already completed file, where you'd have access to Sweet Scent for forcing encounters and Repel for preventing them. There are a lot of people trying to break Pokémon, but most of them aren't doing so from the perspective of speedrunning.
(Also, I think natures of NPC trainers' Pokémon differ between [J] and [U], although I'm not 100% sure on that. That could conceivably make a difference.)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
What I'm saying is that there's no particular reason, based on the rules, to prefer either version if there are no version-specific glitches that save time. There's not a reason to pick the English version in particular, but there's also not a reason to pick the Japanese version in particular. So it would be down to what the TASer preferred.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
ALAKTORN wrote:
if JP version is faster, why aren’t you using it? there’s no rule about having to use the English version anymore
If the only difference is the amount of text, the JP version isn't faster. Differences in text due to language don't count towards the time or the purpose of comparing runs.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
Bobmario511 wrote:
I wonder just how many games can be glitched like this, it's crazy. Yes vote.
Seriously? Probably most of them.
The vast majority of released programs end up having exploitable security bugs, at least in their earliest versions. Games are no different, and an exploitable security bug in a game = total control. It's just a matter of trying to find it.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
It's quite easy to underestimate the dedication of video game fans. As long as there's anyone on the Internet willing to play through the game on emulator for you to make the verification movie (and send it to you), that'd be enough. I'm not sure if anyone does Let's Plays of Melee any more, but if they do, that'd be a good place to look, for instance.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
I dislike using nonstandard controllers for TASing for the same reason SDA dislikes controllers with turbo buttons.
I am, however, perfectly fine with the use-lots-of-multitaps solution. (Especially because connecting 8 controllers to SMW is an amusing mental image.)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
The gameplay looks good as far as it goes, but this seems a lot shorter than other Super Monkey Ball games. Are you sure you were playing on the hardest difficulty? (If there are multiple difficulties, then given that they typically contain entirely disjoint levels in Super Monkey Ball, I guess you'd have to complete all of them to complete the game.)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
Warepire wrote:
Ilari wrote:
Oh, and regarding using C++... Stay away from Win32 API as much as possible (especially for GUI tasks), as it is just bad.
When coding for Windows only, please explain this, because as far as I know all CRT functions on one level or another maps to the Win32 API. Which means, that you will still end up using it, it just won't be as apparent from the code.
Unlike Linux, Windows' actual kernel-level syscalls are a long way away from the actual APIs the programmer uses; they're very thick wrappers, rather than thin wrappers. You're getting substantially different functionality if you access the Windows kernel via .NET than if you access it via Win32 (USER/GDI/SYSTEM), as a result.
Regarding C/C++ vs languages like C# / Java, I found that many who developed with C# / Java and then look into learning C/C++ have a higher difficulty remembering to use free/delete (correctly, or at all), and sometimes also have difficulties understanding proper indexing of arrays or other data-containers. It of course depends on what kind of programs you are interested in learning how to develop.
This is because almost every language in existence does the free/delete at the appropriate time automatically for you; this is a solved problem on all but very resource-constrained systems. (Of course, the very resource-constrained systems are exactly the sort of systems on which C is designed to do well. Likewise, C++ is mostly used for games development, which is effectively resource-constrained because most games try to push the hardware to its limits, and thus don't have much to spare.)
What I dislike most with languages like C# and Java though is that they compile into byte-code instead of actual CPU instructions requiring an extra interpreter / re-compiler layer to exist between the machine and the program in order for it to work, making it slower than it has to be. This is a little less of a problem with C#, but still a problem as it wastes CPU needlessly. While CPU power today isn't as limited as it was before, it's nonetheless slightly limiting the possibilities of your program. But this also depends on what you want to develop after learning the language, because today you will require some really advanced or computation heavy programs to really notice a difference.
The penalty from going via bytecode is IIRC something like 1.5× to 2×, which is pretty small compared with the other overheads you get from high-level languages. Java tends to be pretty slow and bloated in practice, but that isn't because it uses bytecode (it's just as slow and bloated if you natively compile it with gcj), it's because Java's libraries have a huge number of levels of abstraction. C# and C++ are likewise noticeably slower than C if you use their standard libraries to their full potential, rather than trying to avoid them as much as possible; convenience tends to come with a performance penalty.
(You'll find that the commercial games which are typically written in C++ often ignore large swathes of the language in order to try to get as much performance as possible. It'd be pretty rare to use a reference-counted pointer, for instance, even though such pointers are common in C++ programming more generally.)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
EEssentia wrote:
ais523 wrote:
If you badly need to be able to control everything your program does, C is a good choice. But if you're working on a mature platform already (e.g. Windows development), you'll be better off with a language that doesn't force you to do everything yourself.
That depends. C++ is a much better choice than C, where it is possible to use since it allows you full control while remaining a high-end language rivalling Java, C#, etc.
Well, C++ is a pretty good all-around choice anyway since it doesn't restrict you to either high or low-level, is portable, etc.
Actually, I'd call C++ a pretty bad all-around choice, for much the same reasons ;)
The problem is that you still have to take care of everything yourself, although now you're typically subcontracting the details to various libraries rather than doing it directly; and because C++ gives you so many options, it means that you have to learn all the options to have much of a chance of following someone else's code. I learned C++ back before, say, smart pointers were invented (or at least, had found their way to the textbooks and compilers I used), meaning that I have trouble following anyone else's code that uses them, and they'd likely have similar problems following my old code.
In general, I prefer languages that are good at one thing, and appropriate for that sort of problem. As such, I feel C is a better language; it's good at something that doesn't come up very often, but it's usually clearly the right language when it does. Languages that try to be good at everything too often end up doing nothing well…
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
I'd say don't bother if that's the sort of programming you want to do. C is really only designed for situations where you're getting next to no help from the platform, either because it's very low-end and doesn't have an OS (e.g. most old consoles), or because you're trying to do something very high-performance beyond what a typical programming language can provide, or because you're actually writing the platform yourself (e.g. operating system development) and don't have another platform below that to help you out.
If you badly need to be able to control everything your program does, C is a good choice. But if you're working on a mature platform already (e.g. Windows development), you'll be better off with a language that doesn't force you to do everything yourself.
(Incidentally, if you want to get into Windows development in particular, you probably want to learn C#, which doesn't have much in common with C apart from the name. Too often, though, it seems that developing for Windows in particular isn't actually what you wanted, and you just want a program that anyone can run. In such cases, going for a language that isn't tied to a platform is more worthwhile.)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
There's no cheating of any kind involved; all the glitches used in TASes can be done on actual consoles if you press the buttons fast enough. It can be instructive to watch console runs of something like Ocarina of Time; the console players get their glitches frame-perfect via spamming the pause button in order to create lag, slowing the game down enough that they can get all the inputs in at exactly the right moments.
Common causes of hyper-speed glitches involve doing something on the first possible frame (in many platformers, if you jump the exact instant you hit the ground, you won't lose speed, meaning you can often maintain a faster-than-normal speed), and messing up a game's wall ejection routines (turn round the instant you hit a wall, and many games will believe you to have entered it from the other side and eject you backwards, pulling you deeper into the wall; and wall ejection is often very fast).
Many glitches are actually discovered by players just playing on console, and eventually get added to the TAS, in fact. Sometimes they're found specifically for the TAS, but that's rare (except in games which are very heavily studied).
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
The amount of space needed to write a message to the screen can't be that far off the amount of space needed to copy one byte between arbitrary memory locations, or to jump to an arbitrary memory location. You'd then just need somewhere in RAM to store the program while you were bootstrapping it.
FWIW, I suspect the majority of old console games have total control glitches, just people tend not to be looking for them. Anything that crashes a game but only sometimes (like the Coin Case in G/S) is a prime candidate for looking at to see if it's exploitable.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
I personally have no issue with plugging/unplugging controllers that the game is designed to support. I think it's more of a problem if you're attaching unexpected controllers to the game, or things it likewise wasn't designed to support (although possibly still acceptable), but if the game has clearly been written with the expectation that a player might use three controllers and detach one, exploiting a bug in the game's routines for doing that is acceptable.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
If I'm playing a game on an emulator, it's because I'm TASing, so a mouse and keyboard are enough (to give the most accurate possible input).
For playing games on my PC generally, I use an Xbox 360 controller, because it works perfectly with Linux. (Its D-pad is also terrible, though; I tend to use the left analog stick as a replacement except in menus.)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1022
We're not working on the NetHack TAS right now (dwangoAC is busy), but when we do, we stream it via termcast.org (which you can access using telnet on Linux and Mac OS X, and PuTTY on Windows). The stream's actually continuously up, but it isn't very interesting when we're not TASing, unless you like staring at a blank screen.